“Experience does not consist of what one has lived but of what one has reflected about” J. Maria de Pereda (Spanish writer, 1833-1906)

David Santos Martinez

You “use” it unconsciously everyday, every hour, every minute of your life, but you don’t even think about it. In fact, most of us take it for granted; but don’t worry, there is nothing you can do to get rid of it, experience is always there.

Let’s have a look, for example, at the first thing you do in the mornings: you wake up.

You wake up, let’s say, at 7:30; neither at 7:25 nor at 7:35; no, at 7:30. This simple action, which you carry out automatically every morning during the week, is a result of something much more complex. You wake up at that time after having concluded (by being early some times and late others) that it is by then when you have exactly time enough to get punctually to your job, university, school…

Something identical happens when, after getting wet under the rain several days because of not having an umbrella, you decide to buy one. This is nothing but a consequence of your experience.

Once we have reached this point I think that we can appreciate how something comes to be part of the experience when there is a reaction to it. It doesn’t matter if the modification is huge or tiny; the thing is that it exists. And, obviously, there is no way of reacting to something without thinking about it. Let’s go again with examples, but now a more “serious” one.

Imagine that you travel to Rwanda and, while you are walking on the street, you see three children almost naked rummaging in a pile of litter trying to find something to eat. Two things can happen inside your mind now. The first one: You don´t pay any special attention to the “picture” and you just see three children, something usual for you because there are children everywhere. But the second one is completely different. You see three children without anything to eat and growing up in an environment full of difficulties that, despite the considerable and evident difference of age, you have never faced. The fact that you think all of this doesn´t change the situation at all, but it probably changes your mind or at least it makes you realize how lucky you are because of having been born in a place where you have always had what you needed. As a consequence of mulling over the circumstances, you will never forget that vision and it will be part of your experience forever.

Although that was an extreme example and fortunately we don´t have to make such analysis of the circumstances around us (if that were the case, we would certainly go crazy in a matter of days), what I want to say is that if we thought a little bit more about some facts that surround us in our daily lives, we would not only have a better understanding of what life is, but we would definitely be more experienced persons.